Agate Nesaule at the University of Washington, Seattle

January 10, 1997

Jura Avižienis: Good afternoon, the center for West European studies with the European studies program and the Baltic studies program at the University of Washington are pleased and honored to present Professor Agate Nesaule who will speak to us today on the topic of women and war. Agate Nesaule is professor of English and Women studies at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. She is the author of A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile which last year was awarded the 1996 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It has just been released in paperback by Viking Penguin it will be available after the lecture if you are interested, but unfortunately we are on a really tight schedule because Professor Nesaule will be heading off to <> for an interview <>. So if you would like to get your book signed she will be at Elliot Bay Bookstore at 7:30 and tomorrow at 7pm at the Latvian Center.

Nesaule: Thank you Jura and thank you Professor Guntis Smidchens who organized this and I also would like to thank the publisher Penguin for helping me come here. Can you all hear in the back? Ok then I am going to use a microphone, I think that will work a little better. But I would like to, the title Guntis and I had to think of a title very quickly and so it is Women and War—I’d like to give you a sense of how the war continued to live for me. So for those of you, you haven’t read the book I will read a passage or two and then I’ll talk briefly about how I was finally able to write the book. And then I’ll stop and see if there are questions or comments, particularly questions which I think < > are about any aspect. About any aspect of the book, but if there aren’t there are other things in the back of mind that we can do, so…

My book, A Woman in Amber, has been called a book about war but it is a particular kind of book about war, first of all it is about civilians rather than soldiers. And in this country we are beginning to have an understanding that war adversely affects soldiers. Mostly in the past men that have gone to war and have been in combat situations, either what they have seen or what they have actually participated in. But even that is still, of course, open to debate. Currently we are wondering whether, people are discussing the Gulf War Syndrome is it psychological, is it chemical, is it neurological damage, is it all hopes, kind of thing. So the question about, even though there has been a lot of research and actually a lot of knowledge about the fact that war affects the men who fight it in adversely. That even isn’t fully accepted by many people today or not known by many people today.

My book, of course, is not about soldiers, but about civilians. And it is largely about women and girls. I made a very conscious decision to write mostly about the women in my family and to write very little about my father which is another whole very rich and wonderful story which I wish to tell sometime in the future. Its, my book also though presents scenes from the war, deals quite a bit with the after affects of war and the long after affects of war. A general misconception about war is that finally a truce is declared or a treaty is signed and the weapons are put away and most wounds heal and people go home and settle into their lives. And I have written about first of all the physical after affects of war which are almost inevitably starvation, because people haven’t grown food during the war, it’s been used by the armies if it I exists or it has been destroyed. And then also about the emotional after affects, which can be quite long term.

In addition my book is a mother-daughter story about the way that war affects family relationships and those, the political and the personal come together as in everything else. And it is also a immigrant story it is about what it is like to come to the United States in the 1950s which is kind of like coming to another country but only double because the 1950s are so different from the 1990s. And to come to Indiana in the 1950s and to learn about the United States. And then it’s about getting into a bad relationship and growing out of that relationship and getting out of that relationship and into another one. One of my returning students wrote to me for Christmas and said she had bought a copy for her female friends, to remind, she said every woman should have one, to remind us of what kind of men we don’t want and what kind of men we really do very much appreciate. And finally it is a love story. So there are other things going on in the book, besides war.

But to give you a sense of the war aspect, I’ll read you a brief scene from it. This is a from a central chapter that is called “Mothers and Daughters” and there is a lot going on in this chapter. Because it is a chapter in which I try to describe how my relationship with my mother which was already fragile because she had lived through the losses of World War I, how the relationship with my mother was changed during the Second World War and the more continued to live for me largely in silent images. After after it was all over, I didn’t have those images in words, how I did not think I would talk about them to anybody.

This is in the spring of 1945, my family and I who are Latvian had gone to Germany from Latvia in the fall of 1945, in the fall of 1944 excuse me, in order to escape the advancing Russian armies into Latvia. And at this point, all the men had been taken away, there was just my mother, my father had been taken away, because one of the first thing the Russian soldiers did when they came into that part of Germany was to separate the women from the men and boys. And all the men had been taken away, my sister was 8 and a half and I’m 7 at this point, there is just my mother and my grandmother and we were sheltering in an orphanage. At one point the soldiers marched us outside, we thought we were going to be shot and there is a lot that happens between my mother and me because of that. But this is what we finally saw, what the soldiers had taken us outside to see, to demonstrate:

“Soldier put his hands on my neck and demonstrates again the strangling motions. He barks at my mother to translate, she could speak Russian because she had grown up in Russia though she was Latvian. The soldier is finally out of my line of vision so I can see what was under the tree. Lying on the ground is Heidi, the girl who sits next to me in school. Heidi’s face is blue and puffy but her body looks almost the same. Her feet are bare and she is wearing no coat only a short sleeved dress with tiny spreks of blue flowers. The bit of petticoat that shows is muddy, her clothes and hair are soaked, she must have been lying here for a long time. She seems heavier somehow. Next to Heidi is her mother, a rag is tied across her mother’s eyes, there is a dark hole in her cheek. There are two or three dark holes in her chest. She too is barefoot. Her dress is pushed up above her hips; there is a dark stain between her legs. My mother is translating, her voice shakes. He says that if anyone else tries to commit murder or suicide, she will be shot and then we will all be shot too. He says that this mother strangled her daughter and then tried to kill herself but that they stopped her in time. They have shot her as an example of what will happen if anyone else tries to kill herself. He says that we have to understand that they do not like killing. He says that if anyone tries to kill anyone they will shoot all of us. When my mother finishes speaking she tries to cover my eyes again and I let her. I have seen it and will see it again and again. When I close my eyes I see Heidi’s puffy face and her heavy body and her mother’s face turned away from her. It is as if they are engraved somewhere behind my eyes. I try to understand that Heidi’s mother has strangled her, just as the soldier has demonstrated on my neck. She must have done it harder or Heidi would still be alive. I try to imagine it, but I can’t. Later the soldiers must have brought her mother out here, stood her against the Oak (they have done something else to her before they shot her, they have punished her.) I look at the two figures below the Oak again; Heidi’s eyes are open and she is staring unflinchingly into the rain. Her mother is turned away from her. She would be looking beyond the lake if she were not blinded by the cloth. Mother and daughter are only a few feet away from each other, their fingers reach towards each other but they do not touch. We stand watching the rain fall on the corpses, even the soldiers are silent.

My mother leans down and whispers, ‘Are you alright, precious?’

I nod. I would like to tell her I’m not. I do not.”

So, I carried images like that around, with me. One of the thing, and I couldn’t get started about, writing about them, and one of the things, of course, that obviously happens to women in war is that, women are killed and executed and wounded. But another big issue in war, is rape, for women. And I would like to read you, just a brief part of a more peaceful scene. This is a moment of fragile safety. When the, we are again sheltering in an orphanage, just my mother and sister and my grandmother and me. And the soldiers start dragging a woman towards the area where they are going to rape her. And a woman who looks like her sister, got up and started playing the piano.

“Something miraculous happens, a woman who looks like a sister of the one who has been seized, steps to the piano in the corner of the room. She seats herself open set <against the play?> A melody fills the air, she is playing the Lauralion—a lot of you know how that melody goes—I don’t know what it means but I am so sad. A fairytale from old times haunts my mind. It is a lovely play tune melody, strangely appropriate. Startled the soldiers turn towards her, they have not expected this. Their grip on the other lightens, one of the men lets his hand drop all together. The woman left in the middle of the room, creeps backward and her sister keeps playing. She plays the Lauralion several times, and then she plays the waltz. Other soldiers converse again, ready for violence, but the melody is filling the air, and the mesmerized faces of the other soldiers stop them. The women play waltzes, <>, marches and hymns. The soldiers grow tired of listening standing up so one by one they drop up to the floor. They form a circle around the woman at the piano. Their chins rest on their knees, their faces are wrapped with attention, they watch the woman’s hands gliding over the keys. The woman plays and plays and the soldiers listen. When she tires, she nods to her sister who slides onto the piano bench next to her together they play a duet, moving easily into double melodies they must have practiced as girls. My mother plays and while the women are able to play, while the soldiers are able to listen, we are safer then we have been. The women play all the melodies their mother made them practice as girls. They play until twilight descends and soldiers begin to grow restless and wander away.”

Anyway, these were all images, they were gray images for the most part, I can never remember the sun shining during the war though of course it must have been. This is the way memory works. It’s selective. And I could not either write them down or talk about them to anybody. And then finally when I was 47, I had a breakthrough, it was really miraculous the way that things came together. I went to a, I had gotten divorced and I expected that once I was divorced that I had gotten myself out of this situation where I was very unhappy and that now my life would be terrific, and it would be wonderful. And instead of that I found, that I continued to be depressed and actually more depressed. Because I kept thinking about these images and also struggled with depression, though I didn’t have either that term or the diagnosis for most of my life.

So I finally went to a therapist to get a little help, with what I thought was the aftermath of my divorce. Cause I divorced this man who said, “Oh yeah, well everybody has a lousy childhood” when I, when I would say something about the war or starvation afterwards. And my therapist kept asking me about, you know “What happened to you during the war? What happened in Europe?” And I felt so guilty and ashamed of these memories because one of the things, with any traumatic experience I don’t think it is just war, at all, but with anything that makes us feel so very different from other people, it’s very hard to talk about it without disrupting the pleasant, social fabric. And so I would just say well I was born in Latvia and came to the United States when I was 12, that’s all there is to it. And finally, I had a very vivid dream about a seven year old boy who was starving. And we were starving after the war. And my therapist said, “Where were you when you were 7?” And I thought she doesn’t understand me, she doesn’t understand my dream. I think this dream is about how insecure I feel in my new love relationship. And she started questioning me about seven year old that I was. And I was able to tell her just a little bit about some of my war experiences and then I was also, at the same time I fell in love, I was 47, so it’s never too late. We were talking at lunch about my mother who got her PhD at 70 in Comparative Literature which is a very hard degree to get. But anyways, I fell in love at 47, and I happened to, wisely for me, to fall in love with a man who asked wonderful, wonderful questions. And actually wanted to hear the answers and then would remember the answers and then would ask follow up questions and there is nothing better than that for a writer. So I was also able to write this story thinking of him and to get it all out. But I will stop at this little point, I think, because there must, I imagine there are questions that you would rather have me answer then me continuing, but I can continue, so don’t feel you know you have to ask a ques--, are there questions? Yes?

Question: I was surprised when I read in your introduction that your parents and your parents’ friends did not talk about the war because my parents and their friends during the DP camp days that was the main topic of conversation. Then when we came to Chicago in <19?0>, then you know they continued those conversations. So I was wondering why your parents and their friends didn’t discuss the war.

Nesaule: They did and they did not talk about the war. In the camps I remember, talked, being taught about the war and being shown photographs of people who had been bludgeoned to death by the Russians who had been tortured by Cheka. I have, I was, I was shown those and asked never to forget them. They talked, certainly talked about what a privileged life they had had in Latvia, what it was that they had lost. They certainly talked in general terms, we went from Latvia to <>, but I, they never talked about, what, I didn’t find out from my father, for example, that a Russian soldier took his shoes, that he was almost shot, how hum—they took all his clothes, how humiliated he was about that, until he read my book, or read a manuscript of my book. I was never able to talk about my mother what it was like to be pulled forward to be shot, but she was thinking and when she pulled me forward. In other words, the way I heard the war discussed in the Latvian community and also in my family was in very general terms. Rather than in any kind of interior terms, or in terms of moments of guilt, shame and terror. Good questions. Other questions?

Question: I have one. A friend of mine, when she was really young she and her mother and brother escaped from Estonia. And it was at the end of the war and the escape was fairly harrowing and that is the only she has ever mentioned about her previous life. It was like when she came to this country when she was 18 it was almost like her life started here. And it wasn’t—the only thing she told me about her, the escape was that she and her mother get on this boat and it was just the two of them and she said she went to sleep one night and when she woke up her brother was there. Because her mother had had this child by herself in this boat getting out of Estonia into Europe, and she was fortunate because the, her mother ended up marrying an US army officer and he eventually brought them to this country. But you know—she’s always talked about how incredibly fortunate they were, because otherwise her life would have been totally different. But her brother, this is the background for the point I’m making, but her brother, a few years ago, committed suicide and it was, it just seemed so out of context for everything else that had happened. And I was just wondering if there were, if this was a leftover of the after war experiences. She said he had terrible troubles with depression and…

Nesaule: Yeah well, I couldn’t comment about that specifically, but I think there’s a sense in which the next generation has to live with the unexpressed <fate?> of the older generation. And one of the things that have been so moving to me, after publishing this book in hardback, I’ve heard from hundreds and hundreds of people many of them in long, long letters and then people’s readings and that is from the second generation of Latvians. I came over here when I was 12 and I am still of that generation that has some recollection, though not as much as I would have had if I was older, of that experience. But there have been dozens, I would guess hundreds of young Latvians, or young Estonians also who have said to me in one form or another, I always knew there was something big back there for my parents during the war, something that happened. I never understood how they felt, I never could imagine them as children growing through this period of terror and now finally having read this I can see my parents as children. I can weep about them, or I can talk about them or I can begin to try to find out from them what happened or I am no longer so angry at my father for drinking so much. Or, I mean, there is variance of that. That it is the, it’s the, Latvians are, there must be some Latvians in the audience who may disagree with this, but I think that my mark, Latvians are very reserved. They have more of the, these are generalizations you’ll forgive me for using generalizations, but they have more of the Swedish kind of reserve. And, I think that has played into some of this, and so do the Estonians. But this escape story reminds me, I was in a big grocery store in Madison right before I came. And an Estonian woman who had read my book, a woman I would say in her seventies, just ran up to me in the store, and took my hand, and told me the three times that they had escaped from the Russians how that they had been captured almost three times. That part was a real story of triumph for her, she said, and again she said almost the same thing “my life would have been different or I would not be alive of course either.” Other comments or questions, any other questions?

Question: I wonder because your escape and trauma happened at the same time as the Holocaust how did you, did you experience the Holocaust in Germany? I mean, how were your camps, were they different from the Holocaust camps?

Nesaule: Yes, that’s a very, that’s a wonderful question. I certainly, let’s see, when the war ended I was 7. I had no idea of really what was happening in the larger picture, in any sense. I mean, for instance, I was so happy when the German children were skipping around singing “Roosevelt is dead.” And here my parents had been hoping that the Americans come in and I just didn’t put any of that together that you know that he’s an American president, on my side, whatever. But I had no larger awareness then. I began to learn about the Holocaust when I came to this country and it had a very powerful affect on me. The most vivid memory of learning about it, was that one of my high school teachers wonderful Ms. Guthridge… And I put her name in the book because I hope that someone finds her. Because Sue Ellen Guthridge, you know women are kind of hard to keep track of, they marry, change their names and disappear often for that reason. She disappeared and I hope somebody will find her, but she tried to encourage me to write about my experience. And when she, she was only at my high school for one year and she gave me a book, The Diary of Anne Frank, and she said you have just as much to tell you have to tell your own story. And it had a tremendous effect on me, but it also ironically, this is not your intention, it ironically it completely silenced me. Because I thought Anne Frank died, everybody in her family except her family died, what right do I have to say anything? I mean, what right do I have to complain, I’m alive all my immediate family survived it’s a kind of sec-, one of the people who interviewed me said it’s the secondary suffering or marginal experience or whatever it is that I found.

And I struggled with this all the time, the Holocaust while I was writing the book, I’m not sure I finished struggling with Holocaust, and I am quite sure nobody should be finished struggling with the Holocaust anybody but there was all that talent, all that potential, all that creativity lost of which Anne Frank is a symbol, so many, many, many, many other people. And I felt that was the real story of the war is, how could I speak about it? As a professor I taught twentieth century British and American literature largely and also in Women’s Studies. I, in retrospect taught an awful lot of books about the aftermath of war and I would select them and I would say, oh this is wonderful technically or I like the subtext or you know whatever. I wasn’t really fully aware of what I was doing but I always saw those other experiences like the real experiences. I was so taken with <Jersey Kazinski>’s childhood or what I thought was his childhood, which is now been revealed to have been very different he was not separated from his parents, he was not hunted as a child, hunted as a child all over Europe. But he was a hidden child, he had to pretend not to be Jewish. I mean the war had an effect on him except in a different way from the way he told it, but I thought, the Holocaust is there and its very large about the Second World War. It is, <but right, but right> yeah.

Question: Could you tell us how did your book come together, all these different images and then you came up with a total story? And how long it took you?

Nesaule: Wonderful question, thank you. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t get it started. I had tried several times and I had my therapist…after I kinda had this breakthrough I didn’t go back to her, because I didn’t feel the need to. And she said just write a little piece or two. So I wrote this one little sketch about the soldiers giving me the first orange, the Russian soldiers giving me the first orange I ever tasted and all the guilt that accompanied that. So I wrote this little piece, but I still wasn’t making any progress. And then I fell in love and I wrote this story and I thought I was writing a story that had absolutely nothing to do with anything else particularly in my life. I wrote a story called Talking in Bed and it really is a kind of a story that in a way is a love poem. It’s about these two people that are very different, and they are talking in bed and a man asks her to tell him a story and she does and this story about her mother wearing <> riding a bicycle comes up. And I gave the story to my friend John and he liked it and I felt good about having written it. And so forth, and then I was driving one day by myself and I realized with just absolute elation, such a glimpse and it is certainly one of the very happiest times of my life that this is the way I could tell my whole story. That I could start with this Talking in Bed and then have some chapters that shifted back and forth, past and present, then start with leaving Latvia and go chronologically so it wouldn’t be a total mishmash and impossible and then do the shifting back and forth between the past and the present again. And it was just getting this glimpse that was so special but then I did not, I did exactly, here we are a good reader I can tell because you picked it up. I didn’t write it in segments that put it together, and I didn’t write it in chronological order, a little piece went here and a little piece went there but it finally, finally came together.

So, some of you may notice really a good book about writing, I wished it had been published before I started to write, it’s called Bird by Bird. Any of you read it? By Anne Lamott. It’s about writing and the title, it’s really one the best things I have ever read about writing. The title comes from Anne Lamott’s little brother sitting at the kitchen table in despair because he had been asked to describe all the birds of New York. And it was the night before the report was due and he hadn’t done it, and their father who was also a writer said, “Look buddy the way you do it is bird by bird.” Write a little piece and then you write another little piece and then just kinda trust your imagination that it will all come together. One of the things, and this is probably because of being in Twentieth century literature than an earlier period, one of the things that I fortunately had was that I didn’t have a sense that you had to have absolute chronological progression or absolute chronological connections. That you could just take a little piece put some little dashes in between and take another little piece and put it next to it. Which is the way that modern stories and modern poems get put together, whereas in the Nineteenth century, you know, continuity was chronological and other kinds of continuity was much more. Yes.

Question: I have a question about the most disturbing section of the <?> the basis of the scene and you described the soldiers, at least the initial soldiers as Mongolians, dark complexion, slanted eyes. How much of that was reconstructed? In other words, was this what you got from your parents or did you re….did that, was that an image that seared in your mind. You mentioned the language barrier, your mother being able to communicate with them. And if it was recreated, that is you were seven or eight at the time, correct? If it was created, was there any influence from your contact with the Germans, of these people being different, Asiatic? The Russian officer who more or less saved your mother for example seemed to be pictured as white, <better?>. I am not trying to say that the scene was fabricated, but it, I was wondering if these indeed were Asiatic, or if that was an image which you, that grew in your memory.

Nesaule: You mean, is it a racist image?

Question: Not is it racist, necessarily, was this something which…

Nesaule: Well, let me try to answer that. That is, I think it is a really interesting question in many ways. But let me answer most simply to begin with and let’s see if that is helpful. The slanted eyes and the dark faces I particularly remember from when they came into the basement in the middle of the night or towards morning woke us up, the light was really poor. They were totally different and totally horrifying. Now they were a mix, somebody said oh there were no exclusively Mongolian group, I think I make it clear in the book that it was mix of Russian and Mongolian soldiers, there were Mongolian soldiers, there were Russian soldiers, both. And I did not sort them out in any sense at all, I don’t think, as individuals. In part, because I was terrified of looking at them. So, it’s how I remember seeing them, in a couple, very vivid moments. And then I could not, I mean I could not begin to draw distinctions between how many Russian there were, how many Mongolians soldiers there were. Whether they all were superior officers Russian, I mean I just have no, I have no sense of that. But yeah, I think that is a really interesting question, do we, you know when we are, when we are trying to remember or create images of evil or fear, do we resort on the one hand with what we would call racist patterns, black and white, light skin, dark skin, or Christian light and darkness, images of light and dark. That’s an interesting question.

Question: I just wanted to express my gratitude for bringing this all about, because I felt I think for the first time, I am also of Baltic descent, thinking that in the mainstream press, there is someone who speaks to, not particularly my experience because I was born after the camp experience in Europe but just to life as an immigrant. And so I am wondering when you continue to write, do you think of Baltic women as your audience or a part of your audience or…?

Nesaule: You know, I wrote this book with an American audience in mind. I was so blocked as a writer, I could write about academic things but I couldn’t write about this, and so in order for me to write I had to visualize people who would read it and who would still like me after it. So I visualized first <Igenborg?> and John but then I have always had a lot of American women friends, because I have lived largely in parts of the United States where there has been no Latvian community. And I imagine my female friends reading this book so I did not think of Baltic women as an audience. And I did not particularly think of Latvians in American Latvians as an audience until I got closer and closer to the end of the book and then I started getting more and more nervous. What are the Latvians going to, the Latvians in America, what are they going to say about this whole thing so. And a lot of the choices I made in the book, you know, trying to explain who came in when, the Russians or German. I really did that by envisioning an American audience who would not have the story, you know, the general outlines of the story, so clear that they would say, why is she talking about that, we know that all already. I think that is the other thing about if I had thought of a Latvian audience, that probably would have also silenced me more. Because then you know then you get into all those issues, I would not want anybody to think I am speaking for, you know, for a whole group. I can’t do that I can only tell my experience and am I saying what would please all Latvians, whatever that would be, I don’t know.

Question: I was wondering if you have been back to Latvia recently and if you have, what differences would exist between, for example how the women in Latvia dealt with the war versus how immigrants American Latvians have dealt with it. Because they are like, I mean geographically speaking, they everyday can be reminded by it by living in Riga for example versus living in Iowa.

Nesaule: Yes, I have been back to Latvia twice the first time in 1991 when there was an international <> in Latvia and that time I got to go back to the house where I lived until I was seven. And saw that, and it was so changed. I recognized all the nature around it, I recognized the church, I recognized the clothes store, but didn’t recognize our house because all the trees had been cut and surrounding the house. And they had had a shortage of glass and all of these huge sparkling windows with the white curtains they’d been bricked over and there was a metal roof on it instead of this lovely thatched roof. And so it was really different but I had a real connection with the language and nature. And now I really believing in imprinting, what you see first you really love. And I always used to say oh poop to people who would say, if a duck sees a stork its gonna think that it’s its mother and love it. And now I think, oh there might be something to that.

But, that was one trip and the second trip was in 1994 when I took my 88 year old father back and he hadn’t been there for fifty years. And it was the first time he went back and he was able to preach in the two churches which had recently been reopened. One of them had been used as a store place for the war during the Soviet period but they are reopened and being refurbished. And he worked there like a young man baptizing babies, and marrying people who had been living together for 37 years and that kind of thing. That was a very moving trip, because although most of the men his age were dead there were a lot of women, older women some of whom said that I would never had survived the war if you hadn’t taught me this prayer or that prayer, or you confirmed me or you performed my little boy’s marriage or my little boy’s christening. So I’ve been back there twice. That’s to answer the first part of your question.

.The second part of your question is so complex. I am hoping to write about this and in fact I am trying to write about this in the novel I am writing. Or a least a bit about that. The difference, you know, the difference there is between the American Latvians and the Latvia Latvians. And how they come with the hopes, we come with hopes and expectations and love and generosity and often great openness together and how seldom the connection really works. And so I need to, I mean I want to write about that, I need to learn a whole lot more about the women of Latvia. I learned something very fast when talking about Women’s Studies, criticizing femininity as culturally constructed and how ridiculous makeup and advertising is or something, I used just one example about that. And they said, we want that, we had to wear awful clothes and we want to be in a situation where femininity is exalted and valued if it is created so what . So I mean there is so much that we as American Latvians need to learn about them. I also now, just lately, have been thinking there is a lot they need to learn about us. Because it is almost a contest, who had the hardest time? We say we did because we lost our country, we lost everything, it was really very hard to get started here. And so yes we have cars and houses, we don’t really feel we totally belong here. And they say well you know, you went to America and became rich and we had to stay here and endure and where were you? You know. So that is such a complex <> question. Yes.

Question: My relatives remember their Siberian years as if it had happened yesterday. And I felt guilty when I heard all of their Siberia stories because you know I had the life of Riley and the <> in Chicago, so I agree with what you just said.

Nesaule: There is that too, to I meant to add to your comment, you know when I was answering your question earlier about the <>. We also are so much likely to feel guilty because another way that the war was talked about to us, was that you are so lucky. You know, you don’t remember this and you were not deported. And so it fits right in into what we…yeah.

Question: Do you have any suggestions as to how we can break through our parents generalities forcing them to remember specifics? I am a first generation born here and my parents exactly as you speak, they speak of the War basically in general terms. Very, very rarely is there a glimpse of a specific moment happening. We have given my in laws a sent of a video recorder or a cassette recorder asked them to speak of their youth, tell us their story and yet I sense a reluctance of them doing it. What can we do to encourage them to tell us these memories so we can get them down on paper and preserve it for our future?

Nesaule: Well, I don’t know, I don’t know if we can force, force this. You know the human souls has its rights too, you know we have the right to speak or not to speak. I know what you are getting at, how can we encourage? Sometimes the most specific of questions… There’s a book that I have not actually used so I shouldn’t recommend it highly but I will mention it. I wanted to use it in asking my father more questions. My father and I got to be extremely close friends, we were always close actually, I was always Daddy’s girl when I was growing up. But in the last four years or so, my father and I got extremely close. And I was talking to him about very, very significant things but I really had this plan that I would get down every specific. And so I bought this book called, it’s called For Our Children’s Children. It is just a little book that has hundreds of question in it. What, did you have a doll? What did it look like? What kind of clothes did you have? Where did you keep it? In mean, because the unconscious really in one way is like a magician’s hat or something. You know, you pull out this little tiny, you know, bit of chiffon and here comes this whole scarf with three rabbits attached to it. And so I think, specifics, asking about specifics and not necessarily saying, you know, not getting to the hard things first. Cause you know, it takes, to reveal one’s, that the other thing, to reveal oneself it takes courage on the part of the teller, it takes courage on the part of the hearer. That’s why I am so amazed at the reaction to this book, because it is hard for people to hear these things too, and it takes mutual trust. I mean, the person who tells has to trust that you are not going to turn away or your not going to say enough of this. Because your parents have had 50 or more years of experience, learning, people have given them signals because every time they want to talk about some of this hard stuff. No, no, no, no. It’s not just a reluctance to tell, it is also that people shut you off. Well that’s enough of that now, you know. In various ways, subtle or not subtle…good question.

Question: You have to had two, three granddaughters that ask you questions and you are not afraid to tell them. Inquiring little girls and you can tell them everything. That’s my point, where you can reveal all your secrets.

Nesaule: Yes I think that’s great, well I have to, I am very sorry, don’t I have to leave?

Guntis: 10 minutes at least.

Nesaule: Oh 10 more minutes nevermind, I can’t get out of here yet, that’s right, but other people have to go to classes so. Any other suggestions for a…

Question: Yes, I just want to make a point about the women that you mentioned in Latvia. And I worked there quite a bit, I am also of Latvian descent probably about your age, I was eleven when I came here. The fact what they look like, on the surface of what they really do are two different aspects. And I think that women will get much further ahead over there and much faster in liberating themselves than in this country. Remember it only began here in the seventies, we always have to keep that mind. And I always tell the women in Latvia, Americans always think that they are so liberated that part only began in the seventies. And they are in every profession over there and over here women just began getting into the male professions readily. So I am just trying to balance the picture up.

Nesaule: Yeah, I wished I shared your optimism and really hoping, but I don’t. I, in least, in all academic settings that I have encountered. At the academic conference, I went to, that’s a good example.

Questioner: That’s a mistake. You don’t begin with the academic conferences.

Nesaule: You know, but just as an example. There was a whole stage full of men in there and there was indeed one woman and she was the secretary, women there have to deal with tremendous sexual pressure, put downs…

Questioner: Exactly, I know, but I think that they will gain much faster and much quicker.

Nesaule: I hope so, I hope so.

Questioner: That’s what I am saying because the fifties in this country was pretty bad compared to Europe when I came in the fifties. What women were all about in this country.

Nesaule: Well yes and Latvian women certainly in the period were <>

Questioner: Were very liberated.

Nesaule:.. in many professions. But there is a whole mythology there too still of, woman is the soul of the home. There is the movement to, when unemployment, I mean there are realities of women’s lives that don’t make me hopeful. Women are the poorest, women don’t have enough to eat there. When people are laid off, when there is unemployment, it hits women first. So as I said, I wish I could share, yeah. Yeah.

Question: You mentioned that you were a daddy’s girl, then why has your father figured so little in all these war time experiences?

Nesaule: That was a conscious decision not to, I wanted, the book had to have a focus and a thread. And I chose that thread. You know, the connections between my sister, it was really the girls and women is what I chose for this. And in part, because that was the most immediate issue that I felt I had to resolve. But in part, because I couldn’t possibly have done justice to the connection with my father and with his experiences simultaneously with this, so I saved it.

Question: Is that a topic for another book?

Nesaule: I am hoping to write about my father, yeah. Because, and his, and he just died this past September. And there was such a tremendous lot I learned about him in the last four years and also there was such a tremendous lot I learned from him about how to die. And questions of spirituality that go so, that are so much more complex than I had always thought about. And remember he is a Lutheran minister, there is Lutheran theology and then it was, you know in the last few years we started talking about all these things in real depth. And so, I am hoping to write, write about my father in some way. I don’t know whether fiction or non fiction. That was a conscious choice. Any other questions. Thank you so much you have been a wonderful audience.

Transcribed by Jessica Lazdins